It feels like the solutions are in search of a problem that doesn't exist yet. You can't design a system that is impervious to every hypothetical bad faith actor, so I prefer to wait until there are actual problems before I worry about how to address them. I'm not as up on the broader sports world as I was back when it was my job as a sportswriter, but I don't believe there have been any real problems caused by trans women participating in women's sports. The biggest kerfuffle I can recall besides the abominable Semenya treatment is that someone won a Texas state wrestling championship?
Trans women are women, women's leagues are for women, therefore trans women can compete in women's leagues until such time as someone demonstrates a real and pressing problem that a real case is creating, at which time we can address the problems in the fairest, most narrowly tailored way possible.
A trans boy on testosterone was forced to play in the women’s division of a texas state wrestling tournament (despite his fighting to wrestle with the other men), and then he won the competition hands down... which then also caused thousands of people to call him a cheat (among other less charitable things).
This is kinda why this is already a problem, not to mention all of the trans people who avoid sports completely because of the lack of set standards. I personally know 3 women who are too nervous to take up sports they loved pre-transition because they don’t want to be publicly humiliated by people who are otherwise affirming of their gender. Heck, my own mom is super supportive and she still came down on the other side of this issue until I had a serious talk with her.
Setting up inclusive, set standards across the board higher up would help a lot.
I think folk have already suggested diving this stuff by weight/height classes
doesn't matter if that isn't a feasible solution now
the point is that it can be a feasible solution paired along with solid changes of social perception in regards to gender, fatness, etc.
I also object to this hand-wringing over competitiveness when this is about simple human respect
no competition is more important than treating other humans well, and in accordance with their gender
if you can't agree with me on that line, we're not gonna see eye to eye on this
Besides what others said there are currently sports divided by weight where this is still an issue.
Thus the entire conversation here. It's not quite so simple as "do this obvious thing and everything works out".
MMA is a good example of a sport with weight classes and a division by gender. If they just had weight classes there would be a whole lot of women suddenly out of a job doing what they love and have worked hard for.
I think the insistence of a binary approach on shit like hormones is still indicative of our cultural death grip on the concept of binary gender and sex
if we're not willing to reframe how we look at this, then we're gonna keep running face first into this problem over and over and over
Short of creating “middleweight leagues” (problematic as per the arguments made earlier in this thread), I don’t know what the other option is.
Physical performance differs widely enough between cis men and women that the need for separate leagues is obvious, so wouldn’t it be more inclusive and accurate to control based on the real reason for that performance difference rather than base it on something that has proven to be as unrelated and as impossible to lock down as a person’s gender?
Minor quibble: physical performance between cis men and women doesn't differ that widely.
When we're talking about Olympics-level, we're getting into very fine divisions in performance among the top 99.999th percentile worldwide.
The differences in the world records between men and women on the 100m dash, for instance, are less than 1 second. Top 10 in men are 9.58s-9.82s, vs top 10 in women are 10.49s-10.76s.
Rio 2016, men: 9.81s-10.06s
Rio 2016, women: 10.90s-11.29s
To put this in perspective, a healthy non-overweight human in their 20s who isn't specifically training in track and field can expect to run a 100m dash in 13-15s. (And that's not even getting into differences by age. The median age in the US among the entire population is 39, but track and field performance declines precipitously in a person's 30s.)
In other words, the differences within genders and between ages vastly overshadow the differences between genders.
One of the reasons this is a discussion at all is because even minor variations in endocrine response can mean the difference between becoming a legend who collects millions of dollars per year vs going into coaching or changing careers entirely. People who come in 10th place don't get Nike deals.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
+6
Options
ChaosHatHop, hop, hop, HA!Trick of the lightRegistered Userregular
That's for sure true and I don't think anyone in this thread is saying that just because they're a man that they're going to go out on the court and destroy Serena Williams. The difference is that the highest level of competition is all that matters to most people and to continually see women be in 10th place will probably reduce female enthusiasm to compete, or that when you're trying to fill out a World Cup roster, you're looking for an even SMALLER percentile, the best of which will probably all be men.
I have to admit, echoing Atomika and others' sentiments, that it's pretty aburd that a half-second difference in running speed can mean the difference between being set for life in royalties vs returning to a regular job.
I'm interested in this topic because it's about trans representation, which is something I care a lot about. But it's hard not to feel like sports competitions at the national/international level are all very dumb and arbitrary.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I think that's overstating it a little bit. It's more like 95th percentile than 99.999th percentile. And my fat nerd self dragging it out to rec hockey every week aside, the last 5% of the bell curve is where you are going to be when you are talking about sports.
If you combined men's and women's sports on any competitive level, it would wipe out women's sports. Serena Williams isn't going to be finishing 10th at a men's tournament. She'd struggle to finish top 100. That 10.90s 100m dash that won the women's gold in Rio? That would have been good for 17th in the California high school boy state championship finals this year.
Any attempt to de-genderify sports, even with the best intention, is going to simply result in removing an important social opportunity to play sports from girls and women.
I think the insistence of a binary approach on shit like hormones is still indicative of our cultural death grip on the concept of binary gender and sex
if we're not willing to reframe how we look at this, then we're gonna keep running face first into this problem over and over and over
Short of creating “middleweight leagues” (problematic as per the arguments made earlier in this thread), I don’t know what the other option is.
Physical performance differs widely enough between cis men and women that the need for separate leagues is obvious, so wouldn’t it be more inclusive and accurate to control based on the real reason for that performance difference rather than base it on something that has proven to be as unrelated and as impossible to lock down as a person’s gender?
Minor quibble: physical performance between cis men and women doesn't differ that widely.
When we're talking about Olympics-level, we're getting into very fine divisions in performance among the top 99.999th percentile worldwide.
The differences in the world records between men and women on the 100m dash, for instance, are less than 1 second. Top 10 in men are 9.58s-9.82s, vs top 10 in women are 10.49s-10.76s.
Rio 2016, men: 9.81s-10.06s
Rio 2016, women: 10.90s-11.29s
To put this in perspective, a healthy non-overweight human in their 20s who isn't specifically training in track and field can expect to run a 100m dash in 13-15s. (And that's not even getting into differences by age. The median age in the US among the entire population is 39, but track and field performance declines precipitously in a person's 30s.)
In other words, the differences within genders and between ages vastly overshadow the differences between genders.
One of the reasons this is a discussion at all is because even minor variations in endocrine response can mean the difference between becoming a legend who collects millions of dollars per year vs going into coaching or changing careers entirely. People who come in 10th place don't get Nike deals.
I really think your minimizing the differences here. 1 second might not mean anything to you but they mean everything in running. Most of those top ten women would not place in a mixed gender race. Full stop.
So every woman who would hope to get into a championship for a mixed sex league would need to somehow be able to break the current world record. A world record that has stood for 30 years. A record men break on the regular. High school boys break it on the regular. The current record in my state, Ohio, for high school boys is 10.38.https://www.ohsaa.org/sports/records/tfrecrd.htm
And that was made in 2006. And that is just my state.
How exactly is that supposed to help women's representation in sports? How would you even divide things fairly by height/weight? I've gotten my ass kicked in the 100m by both tall and short chicks in the 100m. Bigger girls can be slower but not always. I don't know how to solve this problem but I would really like it if people acknowledge how small gaps can be big problems in sports. Not you specifically, just in general.
It feels like the solutions are in search of a problem that doesn't exist yet. You can't design a system that is impervious to every hypothetical bad faith actor, so I prefer to wait until there are actual problems before I worry about how to address them. I'm not as up on the broader sports world as I was back when it was my job as a sportswriter, but I don't believe there have been any real problems caused by trans women participating in women's sports. The biggest kerfuffle I can recall besides the abominable Semenya treatment is that someone won a Texas state wrestling championship?
Trans women are women, women's leagues are for women, therefore trans women can compete in women's leagues until such time as someone demonstrates a real and pressing problem that a real case is creating, at which time we can address the problems in the fairest, most narrowly tailored way possible.
A trans boy on testosterone was forced to play in the women’s division of a texas state wrestling tournament (despite his fighting to wrestle with the other men), and then he won the competition hands down... which then also caused thousands of people to call him a cheat (among other less charitable things).
This is kinda why this is already a problem, not to mention all of the trans people who avoid sports completely because of the lack of set standards. I personally know 3 women who are too nervous to take up sports they loved pre-transition because they don’t want to be publicly humiliated by people who are otherwise affirming of their gender. Heck, my own mom is super supportive and she still came down on the other side of this issue until I had a serious talk with her.
Setting up inclusive, set standards across the board higher up would help a lot.
Thanks for the explanation.
To me, that just confirms my suspicion that we should just let people compete with their gender until we have a really good reason not to, which we may never get.
I have to admit, echoing Atomika and others' sentiments, that it's pretty aburd that a half-second difference in running speed can mean the difference between being set for life in royalties vs returning to a regular job.
I'm interested in this topic because it's about trans representation, which is something I care a lot about. But it's hard not to feel like sports competitions at the national/international level are all very dumb and arbitrary.
Power output required and force generated to achieve that time is massively non linear. 9.8 s only seems similar to 10.9 s because we are used to a second being short.
10.9 seconds is 11% greater than 9.8 s.
Power output required at those high speeds is going to begin being hugely affected by wind resistance/drag, which is proportional to v^3, so Usain Bolts power output might be 20% higher than the best female runner. I bet strike force required is higher again. Human reaction times are also similar with training, so the actual 'running portion' requires even more difference between Bolt and the best woman.
I think that's overstating it a little bit. It's more like 95th percentile than 99.999th percentile. And my fat nerd self dragging it out to rec hockey every week aside, the last 5% of the bell curve is where you are going to be when you are talking about sports
I didn't come at that number arbitrarily. There are about 13,000 Olympic athletes at summer 2016 and winter 2018 combined, out of a world population of 7.4b people.
And that even implies that athletic ability is transferable between events. Realistically, the percentile is even higher, because for a given class of event (eg, track and field) we should only divide the number of competitors in that class by the population.
If you're expanding the scope of the discussion to all nationally-ranked competitors including, say, NCAA college competitors and ex-olympians who still compete in older age-bracketed events, then sure, that's a larger number of competitors.
But we're still talking about a few thousand competitors in a nation of 325m, so we're still in the realm of fine-grained distinctions within the 99th percentile.
Edit: this applies to LoisLane's objection as well.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I think that's overstating it a little bit. It's more like 95th percentile than 99.999th percentile. And my fat nerd self dragging it out to rec hockey every week aside, the last 5% of the bell curve is where you are going to be when you are talking about sports
I didn't come at that number arbitrarily. There are about 13,000 Olympic athletes at summer 2016 and winter 2018 combined, out of a world population of 7.4b people.
And that even implies that athletic ability is transferable between events. Realistically, the percentile is even higher, because for a given class of event (eg, track and field) we should only divide the number of competitors in that class by the population.
If you're expanding the scope of the discussion to all nationally-ranked competitors including, say, NCAA college competitors and ex-olympians who still compete in older age-bracketed events, then sure, that's a larger number of competitors.
But we're still talking about a few thousand competitors in a nation of 325m, so we're still in the realm of fine-grained distinctions within the 99th percentile.
Edit: this applies to LoisLane's objection as well.
We are talking about competitive sports, so that takes you all the way down to the prep level. This is relevant to a *way* higher percentage of the population than just looking at the Olympics implies.
Minor quibble: physical performance between cis men and women doesn't differ that widely.
When we're talking about Olympics-level, we're getting into very fine divisions in performance among the top 99.999th percentile worldwide.
The differences in the world records between men and women on the 100m dash, for instance, are less than 1 second. Top 10 in men are 9.58s-9.82s, vs top 10 in women are 10.49s-10.76s.
Rio 2016, men: 9.81s-10.06s
Rio 2016, women: 10.90s-11.29s
You got me curious, so I looked into it.
I think you're portraying it a bit more generously than you should. I mean, the upper end times you are giving are right, but if you expand on it to look at all the heats, it's not as close as you're making it sound. That time differential is actually massive in terms of the Olympics.
If they were all running in the same races, in only one heat would a woman have even made it out of the qualifying heats as heat 3 of the preliminary (so not the real heats) heats, men had a 10.92 and a 10.84 second finish.
In the real heats following the preliminary, last chance qualifier, the slowest speed for men is 10.2 seconds.
If we take all the best times for the women in their heats in Rio 2016 and compare them to the weakest of the male heats, 7 eke into the preliminary male heat and then are summarily destroyed in the normal male heats to follow.
The results were definitely closer than I expected, so thank you for bringing it up, but it doesn't change that the women are essentially excluded from competing at the highest levels.
The 100m dash is probably also the closest you'd get, timewise, between the two. The time gap expands in the higher meter dashes.
XBL: Bizazedo
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
Between equally skilled and trained competitors women would have to perform at about 110% to equal the men. You can see this across nearly every timed olympic sport, women will consistently post roughly 10% slower times or 10% less distance or whatever (exceptions: some track & field where they aren't actually doing the same task because of weights, and archery where it's basically equal)
However, the level of competition required to get in means the times required to get out of the men's initial heats are virtually always better times than the women's world record
I think that's overstating it a little bit. It's more like 95th percentile than 99.999th percentile. And my fat nerd self dragging it out to rec hockey every week aside, the last 5% of the bell curve is where you are going to be when you are talking about sports
I didn't come at that number arbitrarily. There are about 13,000 Olympic athletes at summer 2016 and winter 2018 combined, out of a world population of 7.4b people.
And that even implies that athletic ability is transferable between events. Realistically, the percentile is even higher, because for a given class of event (eg, track and field) we should only divide the number of competitors in that class by the population.
If you're expanding the scope of the discussion to all nationally-ranked competitors including, say, NCAA college competitors and ex-olympians who still compete in older age-bracketed events, then sure, that's a larger number of competitors.
But we're still talking about a few thousand competitors in a nation of 325m, so we're still in the realm of fine-grained distinctions within the 99th percentile.
Edit: this applies to LoisLane's objection as well.
We are talking about competitive sports, so that takes you all the way down to the prep level. This is relevant to a *way* higher percentage of the population than just looking at the Olympics implies.
How many track and field prep athletes would you estimate there are nationwide?
Another way of looking at it: what percentage of the overall population do you believe are capable of running (for example) a 100m dash in less than 11s?
I'd be shocked if the answers to either of those questions exceeded 1% of the population.
It's be nice if we had good data of athletic performance across representation samples from the general population, but I couldn't find any.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I have to admit, echoing Atomika and others' sentiments, that it's pretty aburd that a half-second difference in running speed can mean the difference between being set for life in royalties vs returning to a regular job.
I'm interested in this topic because it's about trans representation, which is something I care a lot about. But it's hard not to feel like sports competitions at the national/international level are all very dumb and arbitrary.
Why? I don't see how that follows from the discussion.
shryke on
0
Options
ChaosHatHop, hop, hop, HA!Trick of the lightRegistered Userregular
edited October 2018
I mean you could make this argument against anything that's even remotely merit based. Is it absurd that Dan Brown gets to make a hojillion dollars off of his books compared to however many authors who are nearly as good by whatever you want to measure book quality by? Is it absurd that Tom Hanks gets to make so much money for being an actor when there are so many other actors who also want to act and are also 99% as good at acting? Is it absurd that 45 of the most charismatic and well connected people get to be President? Repeat ad nauseum for everyone who's famous and/or highly paid.
This shit is all about outliers and putting in the 10,000 hours and also having the natural talent and inclination and being the tiniest ittiest bittiest peak of the ice berg because that's what gets attention. Nobody cares about the average or mediocre or being almost good enough. Literally everyone in the world can tell you who Michael Jordan is. I don't know who the equivalent is in the WNBA. People know who Neil Armstrong is, hell, he's got his own movie coming in a few days. I don't think there'll ever be a Buzz Aldrin movie, and nobody knows who the hell Michael Collins is (I did know his name but I wasn't confident enough to put it here without googling it real quick.)
Is all of that absurd? Maybe. But I'm pretty tired of people dismissing athletes and sports as being ridiculous, overpaid, dumb jocks, whatever. They get paid because they work so hard to do what basically nobody else can do. Even the worst NBA player is so much better than the vast, vast majority of people who ever have or will play the game.
How many track and field prep athletes would you estimate there are nationwide?
Another way of looking at it: what percentage of the overall population do you believe are capable of running (for example) a 100m dash in less than 11s?
I'd be shocked if the answers to either of those questions exceeded 1% of the population.
It's be nice if we had good data of athletic performance across representation samples from the general population, but I couldn't find any.
You may be arguing something different, Feral. I don't think anyone is arguing about co-ed for fun leagues where overweight people can come out and play as a form of exercise and winning or losing doesn't really matter as it's an excuse to go drink beer after the game (a rec hockey game, for example).
Bizazedo on
XBL: Bizazedo
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
Why does it matter how many people can run an 11s 100m? I would say nobody could without training for it to begin with; how many people have even run a proper 100m dash at all in the last decade?
I don't see a solution that makes everyone happy. I like the idea of just throwing the doors open and having no gender restrictions on anything, but I don't see a way that doesn't just lead to all competitive leagues being almost completely taken over by men. Which is an undesirable outcome, and is basically the reason why we have women's leagues now.
+4
Options
Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
I think the insistence of a binary approach on shit like hormones is still indicative of our cultural death grip on the concept of binary gender and sex
if we're not willing to reframe how we look at this, then we're gonna keep running face first into this problem over and over and over
Short of creating “middleweight leagues” (problematic as per the arguments made earlier in this thread), I don’t know what the other option is.
Physical performance differs widely enough between cis men and women that the need for separate leagues is obvious, so wouldn’t it be more inclusive and accurate to control based on the real reason for that performance difference rather than base it on something that has proven to be as unrelated and as impossible to lock down as a person’s gender?
Minor quibble: physical performance between cis men and women doesn't differ that widely.
When we're talking about Olympics-level, we're getting into very fine divisions in performance among the top 99.999th percentile worldwide.
The differences in the world records between men and women on the 100m dash, for instance, are less than 1 second. Top 10 in men are 9.58s-9.82s, vs top 10 in women are 10.49s-10.76s.
Rio 2016, men: 9.81s-10.06s
Rio 2016, women: 10.90s-11.29s
To put this in perspective, a healthy non-overweight human in their 20s who isn't specifically training in track and field can expect to run a 100m dash in 13-15s. (And that's not even getting into differences by age. The median age in the US among the entire population is 39, but track and field performance declines precipitously in a person's 30s.)
In other words, the differences within genders and between ages vastly overshadow the differences between genders.
One of the reasons this is a discussion at all is because even minor variations in endocrine response can mean the difference between becoming a legend who collects millions of dollars per year vs going into coaching or changing careers entirely. People who come in 10th place don't get Nike deals.
100 meters is also the shortest distance for a race, which means there is less space for differences to manifest themselves.
If you extend this to 200 meters, the difference essentially doubles (19.92-20.26 vs. 21.87-22.41).
400 meters, it quadruples (43.03-43.74 vs. 47.60-48.97). And so on.
We are also talking about competition, where people are pitted directly against each other and where we only really "care" about the top spots. This is what causes a small difference in populations to become an overwhelming statistical advantage in gender outcomes. Because there are always going to be more men who perform at that level to a comparatively smaller number of women.
A good way to visualize this is via two overlapping bell curves. Take, for example, this chart of median height for men vs. women:
Imagine that the x-axis represents fastest race time. Let's say you wanted to design a race that was gender-agnostic, but you wanted to create "divisions" based on qualifying times. At any point you can draw a straight vertical line to represent a qualifying race time for a given division (i.e., you have to run at least this fast to qualify for the division). You are always going to get more men until you get to the slower times. Not only that, but you will likely always get more men who perform comparatively better because men, as a population, perform better (e.g., 50 men may have a bad day and not qualify for the top tier but will race in the second tier, which still represents 10% of the total female population in that division).
I think that's overstating it a little bit. It's more like 95th percentile than 99.999th percentile. And my fat nerd self dragging it out to rec hockey every week aside, the last 5% of the bell curve is where you are going to be when you are talking about sports
I didn't come at that number arbitrarily. There are about 13,000 Olympic athletes at summer 2016 and winter 2018 combined, out of a world population of 7.4b people.
And that even implies that athletic ability is transferable between events. Realistically, the percentile is even higher, because for a given class of event (eg, track and field) we should only divide the number of competitors in that class by the population.
If you're expanding the scope of the discussion to all nationally-ranked competitors including, say, NCAA college competitors and ex-olympians who still compete in older age-bracketed events, then sure, that's a larger number of competitors.
But we're still talking about a few thousand competitors in a nation of 325m, so we're still in the realm of fine-grained distinctions within the 99th percentile.
Edit: this applies to LoisLane's objection as well.
We are talking about competitive sports, so that takes you all the way down to the prep level. This is relevant to a *way* higher percentage of the population than just looking at the Olympics implies.
How many track and field prep athletes would you estimate there are nationwide?
Another way of looking at it: what percentage of the overall population do you believe are capable of running (for example) a 100m dash in less than 11s?
I'd be shocked if the answers to either of those questions exceeded 1% of the population.
It's be nice if we had good data of athletic performance across representation samples from the general population, but I couldn't find any.
From my experience covering HS sports, it would be normal for a track team to include 5-10% of the school’s population.
I mean, have we seen any reason to believe that the International Olympic Committee hasn’t already found a good answer?
Active levels of testosterone are the reason most cis men have a performance advantage, so when we’re talking about treating an athlete differently despite their having a testosterone count in the single digits, I can only imagine it’s because people don’t realize how much a person’s body changes.
The only immutable bits are a person’s skeleton and their organs. That’s it. Trans women are taller than cis women on average, but other than that, what? Are we worried that slightly larger lungs and a slightly thicker skeleton are somehow a bigger benefit than a negative when an individual has to cart it around with the muscle mass and fat distribution of a cis woman?
Is it a good answer though? I posted a few times earlier in the thread, but I don't think testosterone levels is a particularly good indicator of ability. At least that's not what I am getting from the studies I found, including the study commissioned by the IOC, even though that study somehow comes to a different conclusion.
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
Even at the rec level, women who play sports report higher satisfaction and show higher retention rates when they play in women’s only leagues over co-ed leagues.
De-gendering sports will only result in women losing sports.
Whereas letting all women play in women’s leagues and all men play in men’s leagues will result in more participation, which I regard as positive.
I think it's interesting to ponder the difference between someone trying to cheat, and someone who is not trying to cheat but has biological advantages.
Suppose for a moment you had a literal mind reader, and take the case of a 100% biological male (whatever that means in terms of athletic ability), who for whatever reason mentally identifies as female. They aren't trying to cheat, they aren't gaming the system, they just have always felt more female than male and have thus always identified as female, but they aren't taking any hormones or other drugs.
I would think that in all other non-sports aspects of life, we would all be agreed that they should be allowed into female groups/clubs/whatever. They identify as female so they should be treated as female (again ignoring any weird edge case of someone trying to game a system).
But what about sports? It seems germane to discus the fact that they have some inherent biological advantages, but so do taller people, or people with higher metabolism, or whatever. There are lots of ways elite athletes are different from normal people in terms of biology, so should it matter that this person has additional ways they might be different from their competitors?
Put it another way, should the goal of rules for gender specification be to identify people trying to game the system on purpose, or should the goal be to identify the biological advantages of non-females and eliminate those who have them from that competition?
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
Why does it matter how many people can run an 11s 100m? I would say nobody could without training for it to begin with; how many people have even run a proper 100m dash at all in the last decade?
Discussions on trans rights and discussions on physical performance both have a bad tendency to devolve into gender essentialism. It doesn't take very long about an argument about female representation in any given profession (say, women in the military for example) before somebody brings up the supposed wide difference in physical ability between men and women.
It may seem like splitting hairs (and I tried to preface my argument by acknowledging that it was a 'quibble') but I think phrasing like "physical performance differs widely enough between cis men and women that the need for separate leagues is obvious" contributes to that sort of gender essentialism. I think we need to be explicitly conscious of, and communicate that, we're not actually looking at "wide differences" from the perspective of the general population. We've deliberately constructed athletic competitions to spotlight very subtle differences.
The differences we're talking about in this thread are very important within athletics but unfortunately the memes and phrases and concepts we use don't politely stay confined to the topic of athletics.
And I don't mean to pick on mahswiftkicks here; I don't think they meant anything by it.
(As an aside, race has the same problem: racial essentialists, like 'human biodiversity' advocates, like to use "fast-twitch muscle fiber" as an argument why white people and black people are essentially different. Fast-twitch muscle fiber isn't imaginary, nor are the differences in prevalence of genetic variants like ACTN3-RR which affect the development of fast-twitch muscle fiber between ethnic groups. We shouldn't need to explicitly point out that extrapolating a relatively subtle domain-specific advantage to justify general segregation in other domains is unfair, but I've learned not to underestimate the depths of human ignorance.)
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I think it's interesting to ponder the difference between someone trying to cheat, and someone who is not trying to cheat but has biological advantages.
Suppose for a moment you had a literal mind reader, and take the case of a 100% biological male (whatever that means in terms of athletic ability), who for whatever reason mentally identifies as female. They aren't trying to cheat, they aren't gaming the system, they just have always felt more female than male and have thus always identified as female, but they aren't taking any hormones or other drugs.
I would think that in all other non-sports aspects of life, we would all be agreed that they should be allowed into female groups/clubs/whatever. They identify as female so they should be treated as female (again ignoring any weird edge case of someone trying to game a system).
But what about sports? It seems germane to discus the fact that they have some inherent biological advantages, but so do taller people, or people with higher metabolism, or whatever. There are lots of ways elite athletes are different from normal people in terms of biology, so should it matter that this person has additional ways they might be different from their competitors?
Put it another way, should the goal of rules for gender specification be to identify people trying to game the system on purpose, or should the goal be to identify the biological advantages of non-females and eliminate those who have them from that competition?
See, i don’t find that interesting at all. It’s looking for problems and causing real harm to real trans people when we don’t have a need to do so.
+2
Options
ChaosHatHop, hop, hop, HA!Trick of the lightRegistered Userregular
I think it's interesting to ponder the difference between someone trying to cheat, and someone who is not trying to cheat but has biological advantages.
Suppose for a moment you had a literal mind reader, and take the case of a 100% biological male (whatever that means in terms of athletic ability), who for whatever reason mentally identifies as female. They aren't trying to cheat, they aren't gaming the system, they just have always felt more female than male and have thus always identified as female, but they aren't taking any hormones or other drugs.
I would think that in all other non-sports aspects of life, we would all be agreed that they should be allowed into female groups/clubs/whatever. They identify as female so they should be treated as female (again ignoring any weird edge case of someone trying to game a system).
But what about sports? It seems germane to discus the fact that they have some inherent biological advantages, but so do taller people, or people with higher metabolism, or whatever. There are lots of ways elite athletes are different from normal people in terms of biology, so should it matter that this person has additional ways they might be different from their competitors?
Put it another way, should the goal of rules for gender specification be to identify people trying to game the system on purpose, or should the goal be to identify the biological advantages of non-females and eliminate those who have them from that competition?
Okay, so pure as the driven snow innocent person wants to play in the female or lower T leagues or whatever the hell you want to call it. Now all cisgendered females are at a disadvantage. In order to compete, because there is no barrier to this now, they all start taking testosterone as a steroid because this is their livelihoods and this is what they have to do. Is THAT what we want?
This also is not a theoretical boogeyman like "Oh noes what if they use the wrong bathroom?" Athletes WILL use steroids if they feel they need to in order to get a competitive edge at the job they do for money.
It's a distinction that needs to be made that isn't about a specific athlete's gender (which is irrelevant) but IS about protecting sports for female athletes.
Discussions on trans rights and discussions on physical performance both have a bad tendency to devolve into gender essentialism. It doesn't take very long about an argument about female representation in any given profession (say, women in the military for example) before somebody brings up the supposed wide difference in physical ability between men and women.
Well, two things. I disagree with your base premise that there's a "supposed" wide difference in physical ability between men and women and say, no, there actually is, and it's magnified even more in team sports. Your only example to show that there isn't has been flat out shown to be incorrect among top athletes and is only close to correct if you then say you're talking about a normal, non-athletically trained sample.....which, honestly at that point, is irrelevant imo. They're "normal" and like Cheetos, it doesn't mean anything because, frankly, they're not trying and it'd just be up to RNG at that point.
As to the other part of the thread, I don't think that's able to even be fairly discussed unless you establish whether what you're trying to do is a moral or scientific solution.
Morally, everyone should be included.
If everyone's included, the difference in abilities due to the differences in our bodies will exclude people from ever reaching the top of the mountain, as it were.
XBL: Bizazedo
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
De-gendering sports will only result in women losing sports.
BTW, I was kind of confused about posts like these because I wasn't arguing for degendering sports. I kept thinking "why are people arguing at me about mixed-gender leagues? I didn't say anything about mixed-gender leagues."
It took me several re-reads of my post to understand why, and I think I get it now.
Physical performance differs widely enough between cis men and women that the need for separate leagues is obvious, so wouldn’t it be more inclusive and accurate to control based on the real reason for that performance difference rather than base it on something that has proven to be as unrelated and as impossible to lock down as a person’s gender?
Minor quibble: physical performance between cis men and women doesn't differ that widely.
I think maybe folks interpreted the bolded line to mean "physical performance between cis men and women doesn't differ widely enough to need separate leagues." That wasn't what I was getting at at all. I should have been clearer and rewrote that as: "physical performance between cis men and women differs enough to be important in athletic competitions, but I don't like the implication that it differs widely in general."
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
+1
Options
DemonStaceyTTODewback's DaughterIn love with the TaySwayRegistered Userregular
I guess the thing is this thread is very specifically about athletic competition so any conversation about the matter is understood to be under that pretense.
+4
Options
Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
Again, this goes back to the purpose of competition and why women's sports were created in the first place. If all we care about is identifying the best of the best, then we are basically excluding women from the vast majority of what we consider to be sports. And if that's fine with you, then great, you are pretty much done with this discussion because the only problem of relevance to you as been solved: "Don't exclude women. Expect that men will overwhelmingly win pretty much everything. Oh well, them's the breaks."
But if we want to provide women an environment where they can test and better themselves, then we necessarily have to exclude those who are not women, as they would otherwise dominate the competition. The question is where that standard of exclusion lies. Is it really gender? If so, how do we define gender? If not, what other standard(s) should we be using, and how would we define that?
Which reminds me: Did you know that the closest thing that comes to a definition of religion in the United States government comes from the Internal Revenue Service? Because the government has to clarify what counts as a church or religious organization for tax purposes. Everywhere else the word religion is used, including the Constitution, it is never actually defined.
Which essentially means that if the government lets you pay taxes as a religion, then you're a religion.
I think it's interesting to ponder the difference between someone trying to cheat, and someone who is not trying to cheat but has biological advantages.
Suppose for a moment you had a literal mind reader, and take the case of a 100% biological male (whatever that means in terms of athletic ability), who for whatever reason mentally identifies as female. They aren't trying to cheat, they aren't gaming the system, they just have always felt more female than male and have thus always identified as female, but they aren't taking any hormones or other drugs.
I would think that in all other non-sports aspects of life, we would all be agreed that they should be allowed into female groups/clubs/whatever. They identify as female so they should be treated as female (again ignoring any weird edge case of someone trying to game a system).
But what about sports? It seems germane to discus the fact that they have some inherent biological advantages, but so do taller people, or people with higher metabolism, or whatever. There are lots of ways elite athletes are different from normal people in terms of biology, so should it matter that this person has additional ways they might be different from their competitors?
Put it another way, should the goal of rules for gender specification be to identify people trying to game the system on purpose, or should the goal be to identify the biological advantages of non-females and eliminate those who have them from that competition?
See, i don’t find that interesting at all. It’s looking for problems and causing real harm to real trans people when we don’t have a need to do so.
Why would that hypothetical cause harm? The problem of female vs male leagues already exists, I’m just trying to narrow done what the goal of the separate league is.
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
I think it's interesting to ponder the difference between someone trying to cheat, and someone who is not trying to cheat but has biological advantages.
Suppose for a moment you had a literal mind reader, and take the case of a 100% biological male (whatever that means in terms of athletic ability), who for whatever reason mentally identifies as female. They aren't trying to cheat, they aren't gaming the system, they just have always felt more female than male and have thus always identified as female, but they aren't taking any hormones or other drugs.
I would think that in all other non-sports aspects of life, we would all be agreed that they should be allowed into female groups/clubs/whatever. They identify as female so they should be treated as female (again ignoring any weird edge case of someone trying to game a system).
But what about sports? It seems germane to discus the fact that they have some inherent biological advantages, but so do taller people, or people with higher metabolism, or whatever. There are lots of ways elite athletes are different from normal people in terms of biology, so should it matter that this person has additional ways they might be different from their competitors?
Put it another way, should the goal of rules for gender specification be to identify people trying to game the system on purpose, or should the goal be to identify the biological advantages of non-females and eliminate those who have them from that competition?
See, i don’t find that interesting at all. It’s looking for problems and causing real harm to real trans people when we don’t have a need to do so.
Why would that hypothetical cause harm? The problem of female vs male leagues already exists, I’m just trying to narrow done what the goal of the separate league is.
You're planting the seeds that trans people cause problems with their existence.
I think it's interesting to ponder the difference between someone trying to cheat, and someone who is not trying to cheat but has biological advantages.
Suppose for a moment you had a literal mind reader, and take the case of a 100% biological male (whatever that means in terms of athletic ability), who for whatever reason mentally identifies as female. They aren't trying to cheat, they aren't gaming the system, they just have always felt more female than male and have thus always identified as female, but they aren't taking any hormones or other drugs.
I would think that in all other non-sports aspects of life, we would all be agreed that they should be allowed into female groups/clubs/whatever. They identify as female so they should be treated as female (again ignoring any weird edge case of someone trying to game a system).
But what about sports? It seems germane to discus the fact that they have some inherent biological advantages, but so do taller people, or people with higher metabolism, or whatever. There are lots of ways elite athletes are different from normal people in terms of biology, so should it matter that this person has additional ways they might be different from their competitors?
Put it another way, should the goal of rules for gender specification be to identify people trying to game the system on purpose, or should the goal be to identify the biological advantages of non-females and eliminate those who have them from that competition?
See, i don’t find that interesting at all. It’s looking for problems and causing real harm to real trans people when we don’t have a need to do so.
Why would that hypothetical cause harm? The problem of female vs male leagues already exists, I’m just trying to narrow done what the goal of the separate league is.
You're planting the seeds that trans people cause problems with their existence.
Nowhere did I make that insinuation. You might as well say that the existence of this thread is damaging to trans people.
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
But if we want to provide women an environment where they can test and better themselves, then we necessarily have to exclude those who are not women, as they would otherwise dominate the competition. The question is where that standard of exclusion lies. Is it really gender? If so, how do we define gender? If not, what other standard(s) should we be using, and how would we define that?.
Easy answer: gender is a social contruct and is self-identified. Problem solved.
We already have plenty of examples of what we do with athletes who are born with particularly strong and fast bodies. Mostly we just celebrate them, *occasionally* at younger ages we encourage them to play up to prevent the risk of injury to similarly-aged but much-smaller children. That's about it.
Easy answer: gender is a social contruct and is self-identified. Problem solved.
We already have plenty of examples of what we do with athletes who are born with particularly strong and fast bodies. Mostly we just celebrate them, *occasionally* at younger ages we encourage them to play up to prevent the risk of injury to similarly-aged but much-smaller children. That's about it.
So your answer is that those of the female sex would essentially not have any high level sports?
XBL: Bizazedo
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
I mean, have we seen any reason to believe that the International Olympic Committee hasn’t already found a good answer?
Active levels of testosterone are the reason most cis men have a performance advantage, so when we’re talking about treating an athlete differently despite their having a testosterone count in the single digits, I can only imagine it’s because people don’t realize how much a person’s body changes.
The only immutable bits are a person’s skeleton and their organs. That’s it. Trans women are taller than cis women on average, but other than that, what? Are we worried that slightly larger lungs and a slightly thicker skeleton are somehow a bigger benefit than a negative when an individual has to cart it around with the muscle mass and fat distribution of a cis woman?
Is it a good answer though? I posted a few times earlier in the thread, but I don't think testosterone levels is a particularly good indicator of ability. At least that's not what I am getting from the studies I found, including the study commissioned by the IOC, even though that study somehow comes to a different conclusion.
I'm trying to parse the IOC study, but I'm having a hard time telling whether they are comparing more than high and low testosterone levels among cis women.
Because, yeah, there might not be a huge difference in high/low counts within the cis-normative female range, but the average cis man produces 3 times the amount of testosterone, and that discrepancy accounts for why cis women only have 1/3 to 2/3rds the upper body strength of cis men. If that's the primary contributor to the performance differences between competitors, why not use that? It can't help but be a better metric than "gender assigned at birth".
Easy answer: gender is a social contruct and is self-identified. Problem solved.
We already have plenty of examples of what we do with athletes who are born with particularly strong and fast bodies. Mostly we just celebrate them, *occasionally* at younger ages we encourage them to play up to prevent the risk of injury to similarly-aged but much-smaller children. That's about it.
So your answer is that those of the female sex would essentially not have any high level sports?
No. Because that particular assertion is based on some very strong belief in some very, very counterfactual assumptions.
Posts
A trans boy on testosterone was forced to play in the women’s division of a texas state wrestling tournament (despite his fighting to wrestle with the other men), and then he won the competition hands down... which then also caused thousands of people to call him a cheat (among other less charitable things).
This is kinda why this is already a problem, not to mention all of the trans people who avoid sports completely because of the lack of set standards. I personally know 3 women who are too nervous to take up sports they loved pre-transition because they don’t want to be publicly humiliated by people who are otherwise affirming of their gender. Heck, my own mom is super supportive and she still came down on the other side of this issue until I had a serious talk with her.
Setting up inclusive, set standards across the board higher up would help a lot.
... and, of course, the genesis of the thread, the change in the Canadian sports' governing body's rules.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Besides what others said there are currently sports divided by weight where this is still an issue.
Thus the entire conversation here. It's not quite so simple as "do this obvious thing and everything works out".
MMA is a good example of a sport with weight classes and a division by gender. If they just had weight classes there would be a whole lot of women suddenly out of a job doing what they love and have worked hard for.
Minor quibble: physical performance between cis men and women doesn't differ that widely.
When we're talking about Olympics-level, we're getting into very fine divisions in performance among the top 99.999th percentile worldwide.
The differences in the world records between men and women on the 100m dash, for instance, are less than 1 second. Top 10 in men are 9.58s-9.82s, vs top 10 in women are 10.49s-10.76s.
Rio 2016, men: 9.81s-10.06s
Rio 2016, women: 10.90s-11.29s
To put this in perspective, a healthy non-overweight human in their 20s who isn't specifically training in track and field can expect to run a 100m dash in 13-15s. (And that's not even getting into differences by age. The median age in the US among the entire population is 39, but track and field performance declines precipitously in a person's 30s.)
In other words, the differences within genders and between ages vastly overshadow the differences between genders.
One of the reasons this is a discussion at all is because even minor variations in endocrine response can mean the difference between becoming a legend who collects millions of dollars per year vs going into coaching or changing careers entirely. People who come in 10th place don't get Nike deals.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I'm interested in this topic because it's about trans representation, which is something I care a lot about. But it's hard not to feel like sports competitions at the national/international level are all very dumb and arbitrary.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
If you combined men's and women's sports on any competitive level, it would wipe out women's sports. Serena Williams isn't going to be finishing 10th at a men's tournament. She'd struggle to finish top 100. That 10.90s 100m dash that won the women's gold in Rio? That would have been good for 17th in the California high school boy state championship finals this year.
Any attempt to de-genderify sports, even with the best intention, is going to simply result in removing an important social opportunity to play sports from girls and women.
I really think your minimizing the differences here. 1 second might not mean anything to you but they mean everything in running. Most of those top ten women would not place in a mixed gender race. Full stop.
The lowest qualifying score for men in 100m is 10.16. Let me say that again, 10.16.
http://www.usatf.org/Events---Calendar/2016/U-S--Olympic-Team-Trials---Track---Field/Athlete-Information/Qualifying-Standards.aspx
The fastest a woman has ever run is 10.49s.
So every woman who would hope to get into a championship for a mixed sex league would need to somehow be able to break the current world record. A world record that has stood for 30 years. A record men break on the regular. High school boys break it on the regular. The current record in my state, Ohio, for high school boys is 10.38.https://www.ohsaa.org/sports/records/tfrecrd.htm
And that was made in 2006. And that is just my state.
How exactly is that supposed to help women's representation in sports? How would you even divide things fairly by height/weight? I've gotten my ass kicked in the 100m by both tall and short chicks in the 100m. Bigger girls can be slower but not always. I don't know how to solve this problem but I would really like it if people acknowledge how small gaps can be big problems in sports. Not you specifically, just in general.
Thanks for the explanation.
To me, that just confirms my suspicion that we should just let people compete with their gender until we have a really good reason not to, which we may never get.
Power output required and force generated to achieve that time is massively non linear. 9.8 s only seems similar to 10.9 s because we are used to a second being short.
10.9 seconds is 11% greater than 9.8 s.
Power output required at those high speeds is going to begin being hugely affected by wind resistance/drag, which is proportional to v^3, so Usain Bolts power output might be 20% higher than the best female runner. I bet strike force required is higher again. Human reaction times are also similar with training, so the actual 'running portion' requires even more difference between Bolt and the best woman.
I didn't come at that number arbitrarily. There are about 13,000 Olympic athletes at summer 2016 and winter 2018 combined, out of a world population of 7.4b people.
And that even implies that athletic ability is transferable between events. Realistically, the percentile is even higher, because for a given class of event (eg, track and field) we should only divide the number of competitors in that class by the population.
If you're expanding the scope of the discussion to all nationally-ranked competitors including, say, NCAA college competitors and ex-olympians who still compete in older age-bracketed events, then sure, that's a larger number of competitors.
But we're still talking about a few thousand competitors in a nation of 325m, so we're still in the realm of fine-grained distinctions within the 99th percentile.
Edit: this applies to LoisLane's objection as well.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
We are talking about competitive sports, so that takes you all the way down to the prep level. This is relevant to a *way* higher percentage of the population than just looking at the Olympics implies.
I think you're portraying it a bit more generously than you should. I mean, the upper end times you are giving are right, but if you expand on it to look at all the heats, it's not as close as you're making it sound. That time differential is actually massive in terms of the Olympics.
If they were all running in the same races, in only one heat would a woman have even made it out of the qualifying heats as heat 3 of the preliminary (so not the real heats) heats, men had a 10.92 and a 10.84 second finish.
In the real heats following the preliminary, last chance qualifier, the slowest speed for men is 10.2 seconds.
If we take all the best times for the women in their heats in Rio 2016 and compare them to the weakest of the male heats, 7 eke into the preliminary male heat and then are summarily destroyed in the normal male heats to follow.
The results were definitely closer than I expected, so thank you for bringing it up, but it doesn't change that the women are essentially excluded from competing at the highest levels.
The 100m dash is probably also the closest you'd get, timewise, between the two. The time gap expands in the higher meter dashes.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
However, the level of competition required to get in means the times required to get out of the men's initial heats are virtually always better times than the women's world record
How many track and field prep athletes would you estimate there are nationwide?
Another way of looking at it: what percentage of the overall population do you believe are capable of running (for example) a 100m dash in less than 11s?
I'd be shocked if the answers to either of those questions exceeded 1% of the population.
It's be nice if we had good data of athletic performance across representation samples from the general population, but I couldn't find any.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Why? I don't see how that follows from the discussion.
This shit is all about outliers and putting in the 10,000 hours and also having the natural talent and inclination and being the tiniest ittiest bittiest peak of the ice berg because that's what gets attention. Nobody cares about the average or mediocre or being almost good enough. Literally everyone in the world can tell you who Michael Jordan is. I don't know who the equivalent is in the WNBA. People know who Neil Armstrong is, hell, he's got his own movie coming in a few days. I don't think there'll ever be a Buzz Aldrin movie, and nobody knows who the hell Michael Collins is (I did know his name but I wasn't confident enough to put it here without googling it real quick.)
Is all of that absurd? Maybe. But I'm pretty tired of people dismissing athletes and sports as being ridiculous, overpaid, dumb jocks, whatever. They get paid because they work so hard to do what basically nobody else can do. Even the worst NBA player is so much better than the vast, vast majority of people who ever have or will play the game.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
100 meters is also the shortest distance for a race, which means there is less space for differences to manifest themselves.
If you extend this to 200 meters, the difference essentially doubles (19.92-20.26 vs. 21.87-22.41).
400 meters, it quadruples (43.03-43.74 vs. 47.60-48.97). And so on.
We are also talking about competition, where people are pitted directly against each other and where we only really "care" about the top spots. This is what causes a small difference in populations to become an overwhelming statistical advantage in gender outcomes. Because there are always going to be more men who perform at that level to a comparatively smaller number of women.
A good way to visualize this is via two overlapping bell curves. Take, for example, this chart of median height for men vs. women:
Imagine that the x-axis represents fastest race time. Let's say you wanted to design a race that was gender-agnostic, but you wanted to create "divisions" based on qualifying times. At any point you can draw a straight vertical line to represent a qualifying race time for a given division (i.e., you have to run at least this fast to qualify for the division). You are always going to get more men until you get to the slower times. Not only that, but you will likely always get more men who perform comparatively better because men, as a population, perform better (e.g., 50 men may have a bad day and not qualify for the top tier but will race in the second tier, which still represents 10% of the total female population in that division).
From my experience covering HS sports, it would be normal for a track team to include 5-10% of the school’s population.
Is it a good answer though? I posted a few times earlier in the thread, but I don't think testosterone levels is a particularly good indicator of ability. At least that's not what I am getting from the studies I found, including the study commissioned by the IOC, even though that study somehow comes to a different conclusion.
De-gendering sports will only result in women losing sports.
Whereas letting all women play in women’s leagues and all men play in men’s leagues will result in more participation, which I regard as positive.
Suppose for a moment you had a literal mind reader, and take the case of a 100% biological male (whatever that means in terms of athletic ability), who for whatever reason mentally identifies as female. They aren't trying to cheat, they aren't gaming the system, they just have always felt more female than male and have thus always identified as female, but they aren't taking any hormones or other drugs.
I would think that in all other non-sports aspects of life, we would all be agreed that they should be allowed into female groups/clubs/whatever. They identify as female so they should be treated as female (again ignoring any weird edge case of someone trying to game a system).
But what about sports? It seems germane to discus the fact that they have some inherent biological advantages, but so do taller people, or people with higher metabolism, or whatever. There are lots of ways elite athletes are different from normal people in terms of biology, so should it matter that this person has additional ways they might be different from their competitors?
Put it another way, should the goal of rules for gender specification be to identify people trying to game the system on purpose, or should the goal be to identify the biological advantages of non-females and eliminate those who have them from that competition?
Discussions on trans rights and discussions on physical performance both have a bad tendency to devolve into gender essentialism. It doesn't take very long about an argument about female representation in any given profession (say, women in the military for example) before somebody brings up the supposed wide difference in physical ability between men and women.
It may seem like splitting hairs (and I tried to preface my argument by acknowledging that it was a 'quibble') but I think phrasing like "physical performance differs widely enough between cis men and women that the need for separate leagues is obvious" contributes to that sort of gender essentialism. I think we need to be explicitly conscious of, and communicate that, we're not actually looking at "wide differences" from the perspective of the general population. We've deliberately constructed athletic competitions to spotlight very subtle differences.
The differences we're talking about in this thread are very important within athletics but unfortunately the memes and phrases and concepts we use don't politely stay confined to the topic of athletics.
And I don't mean to pick on mahswiftkicks here; I don't think they meant anything by it.
(As an aside, race has the same problem: racial essentialists, like 'human biodiversity' advocates, like to use "fast-twitch muscle fiber" as an argument why white people and black people are essentially different. Fast-twitch muscle fiber isn't imaginary, nor are the differences in prevalence of genetic variants like ACTN3-RR which affect the development of fast-twitch muscle fiber between ethnic groups. We shouldn't need to explicitly point out that extrapolating a relatively subtle domain-specific advantage to justify general segregation in other domains is unfair, but I've learned not to underestimate the depths of human ignorance.)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
See, i don’t find that interesting at all. It’s looking for problems and causing real harm to real trans people when we don’t have a need to do so.
Okay, so pure as the driven snow innocent person wants to play in the female or lower T leagues or whatever the hell you want to call it. Now all cisgendered females are at a disadvantage. In order to compete, because there is no barrier to this now, they all start taking testosterone as a steroid because this is their livelihoods and this is what they have to do. Is THAT what we want?
This also is not a theoretical boogeyman like "Oh noes what if they use the wrong bathroom?" Athletes WILL use steroids if they feel they need to in order to get a competitive edge at the job they do for money.
It's a distinction that needs to be made that isn't about a specific athlete's gender (which is irrelevant) but IS about protecting sports for female athletes.
As to the other part of the thread, I don't think that's able to even be fairly discussed unless you establish whether what you're trying to do is a moral or scientific solution.
Morally, everyone should be included.
If everyone's included, the difference in abilities due to the differences in our bodies will exclude people from ever reaching the top of the mountain, as it were.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
BTW, I was kind of confused about posts like these because I wasn't arguing for degendering sports. I kept thinking "why are people arguing at me about mixed-gender leagues? I didn't say anything about mixed-gender leagues."
It took me several re-reads of my post to understand why, and I think I get it now.
I think maybe folks interpreted the bolded line to mean "physical performance between cis men and women doesn't differ widely enough to need separate leagues." That wasn't what I was getting at at all. I should have been clearer and rewrote that as: "physical performance between cis men and women differs enough to be important in athletic competitions, but I don't like the implication that it differs widely in general."
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
But if we want to provide women an environment where they can test and better themselves, then we necessarily have to exclude those who are not women, as they would otherwise dominate the competition. The question is where that standard of exclusion lies. Is it really gender? If so, how do we define gender? If not, what other standard(s) should we be using, and how would we define that?
Which reminds me: Did you know that the closest thing that comes to a definition of religion in the United States government comes from the Internal Revenue Service? Because the government has to clarify what counts as a church or religious organization for tax purposes. Everywhere else the word religion is used, including the Constitution, it is never actually defined.
Which essentially means that if the government lets you pay taxes as a religion, then you're a religion.
Why would that hypothetical cause harm? The problem of female vs male leagues already exists, I’m just trying to narrow done what the goal of the separate league is.
You're planting the seeds that trans people cause problems with their existence.
Nowhere did I make that insinuation. You might as well say that the existence of this thread is damaging to trans people.
Easy answer: gender is a social contruct and is self-identified. Problem solved.
We already have plenty of examples of what we do with athletes who are born with particularly strong and fast bodies. Mostly we just celebrate them, *occasionally* at younger ages we encourage them to play up to prevent the risk of injury to similarly-aged but much-smaller children. That's about it.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
I'm trying to parse the IOC study, but I'm having a hard time telling whether they are comparing more than high and low testosterone levels among cis women.
Because, yeah, there might not be a huge difference in high/low counts within the cis-normative female range, but the average cis man produces 3 times the amount of testosterone, and that discrepancy accounts for why cis women only have 1/3 to 2/3rds the upper body strength of cis men. If that's the primary contributor to the performance differences between competitors, why not use that? It can't help but be a better metric than "gender assigned at birth".
No. Because that particular assertion is based on some very strong belief in some very, very counterfactual assumptions.